“Once hailed as the first true rival to the iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire no longer seems to be much of a threat to Apple’s tablet,” John Paczkowski reports for AllThingsD. “The Fire had no impact on Apple’s March-quarter iPad sales. Indeed, during the company’s second-quarter earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer said Apple is selling new iPads ‘as fast as we can make them.’”

“And, according to the latest data from IDC, global Fire shipments dropped from 4.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011 to less than 750,000 units last quarter,” Paczkowski reports. “From 16.8 percent to about 4 percent worldwide market share in a single quarter. That is a swift and ugly decline.”

Paczkowski reports, “’The lower priced iPad 2 has seemed to offset some of the original threat of the lower priced Fire,’ Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes says. ‘Many consumers seem willing to pay $399 for a feature packed tablet with a strong and developed ecosystem rather than $199 for a relatively underpowered tablet.'”

There are others that feel your way. As stated above, they’re a tiny, nearly insignificant number of people, whose combined purchasing power accounted for a whopping 4% of the market.
Heck, I bet if every one of those Kindle buyers bought shrink-Pad, Apple’d not even covered the cost of developing it.

What about the tiny, nearly insignificant number of people who bought smartphones prior to the iPhone’s launch? Should that have been an indicator that Apple had no business jumping into the smartphone market?

How about the tiny, nearly insignificant number of people buying flash memory based mp3 players before the iPod nano launched? Should Apple have looked at that and said “Why bother with a tiny iPod? Everybody clearly likes the HDD models”?

You don’t know what the market for an iPad mini looks like until Apple launches it and people can see it, hold it and use it. The failures of previous market entrants should hold no bearing on Apple’s potential success.

I think Apple has a much better handle on the market for a smaller-sized iPad than any of you. And Steve Jobs stated definitively that Apple had investigated a 7″ iPad and decided that the form factor was not appropriate for what people ultimately use tablets for.

Thus, no 7″ iPad will be introduced.

The portability issue is ridiculous. You still can’t put a 7″ iPad in your pocket unless you have huge pockets, and few people carry their iPads (or iPhones) around without a case anyway, which just makes the 7″ iPad even thicker and wider.

Yeah, just like Steve said definitively that the iPod didn’t need video capabilities and the iPhone didn’t need native third party apps.

Nothing Steve said was ever final.

And portability is more than what you can put in a pocket. It’s also a question of weight. The primary benefit of the iPad mini will be its lightness, which should be well under a pound, making it less cumbersome for extended periods of reading.

@ cb: I have to defend MDN here. They said nothing about the iPhone. They spoke only about the Fire vs the iPad.

I also have to point out that:

1) There IS a market for an actual POCKET SIZED iPad. It’s called the iPod Touch. It is the best selling iPod. It makes Apple a large profit. I own one. I luv it. I use it every single day and have it with me always. It is solid metal and glass, not plastic Kindle Fire junkware.

2) Smashing the iPad screen down to ~7″ does NOT sufficiently improve portability, unless you happen to be Captain Kangaroo with big pockets on your coat. No one is going to stick a 7″ into their pocket.

3) Nothing all, ever, has made any profit in the 7″ OtherPad market. That market is an utter failure, exactly has Steve Jobs and Co. had predicted. Amazon sold the Fire at a LOSS, which explains ALL of its sales. Apple has zero interest in that market.

It does not, however, mean Apple would waste their time with a 7.85″ iPad. The iPad mini would be a great device that corrects many of the Kindle Fire’s mistakes, such as having a slightly larger (practically 8″) 4:3 screen and the entire iEcosystem at its disposal (apps will NOT have to be re-done contrary to popular belief). The iPad mini is still game on and Apple should proceed undeterred because they will once again get it right where so many others have failed.

Your analysis makes no sense. Apple should release an iPad which is just 2″ smaller than the current iPad? Really? Why is that such a benefit? It certainly doesn’t add much for portability. The biggest difference is you probably lose battery life due to less battery packed into the case, because the electronics would still take up the same amount of room.

So you wind up with a smaller screen, shorter battery life, and still can’t put it in your pocket like an iPod Touch. You have also just introduced another variable into the manufacturing, shipping, and sales chain, plus potential issues for developers (they would have to make some changes to their apps, even if it is easy or minor, to account for the new screen size). That makes no sense whatsoever.

“So you wind up with a smaller screen, shorter battery life, and still can’t put it in your pocket like an iPod Touch. You have also just introduced another variable into the manufacturing, shipping, and sales chain…”

It sounds like you’re describing the 11″ MacBook Air. Lol. Funny how Apple decided to come out with that even though 2″ doesn’t make a noticeable difference (at least according to you).

A cheap, on-paper competitive product from a major brand got into peoples’ hands during the holiday season. The on-paper comparisons became real-world comparisons. Sales followed suit. Nothing to see here really.

seen it over and over again: pundits blowing up Apple rivals capabilities way out of proportion and then real sales numbers come out to knock them back down to Earth: all these were supposed to be Apple ‘killers’ that crashed : Palm Pre, Zune, Kin, Moto Droid, Xoom etc, now the Fire…

this morning I’m browsing through Lumia 900 etc news.. same crock.

No doubt this constant stream of nonsense is what is helping keep Apple stock down with compressed P.Es … all the big PC using Excel wielding fund managers keep believing the NEXT one will kill Apple…

I bought a similar tablet to the Fire to geek around on, and came to one conclusion about all of them: all of the cheap Android tablets require rooting to make them even remotely useful, and even then, you have to constantly kill apps that suck up the battery life and spy on you. They’re all junk, plain and simple.

Yes, another huge and overlooked reason why 7″ Android tablets have failed is due to the simple fact that they run Android, an inferior OS for mobile operation. The iPad mini being equipped with iOS alone would be a monumental improvement over its flailing competitors.

It’s absurd to point to these handicapped devices and say that an iPad mini can’t succeed where they have failed.